"The mild, sweetly reasonable, social-democrat air of Sweden hasn't mellowed Feiler."

When I meet Dror Feiler he's already coming downstairs to the front door wearing a preoccupied frown. He spots me and asks ‘Who are you?' with a bewildered air. ‘Ah, yes, yes' he says when I tell him, ‘come and look at this!'.

Without waiting for a reply he strides off across the courtyard.

We're in the centre of an extraordinary rabbit warren of apartments tucked down a side-street in the south of Stockholm, where he's lived for the past decade.

‘We also have a gallery here where we do installations', he says or rather shouts over one shoulder, without breaking his stride. We duck our heads to enter the building (it dates from the 17th century so the doors are lower than you expect, the long wooden-beamed passages interestingly crooked).

The ‘gallery' is barely the size of a sitting-room. It's white and completely bare apart from a forest of partly-inflated balloons on the floor, each mounted on its own vertical mount like a windsock.

‘We're still assembling this. It's by a German artist who I think is very interesting,' he says. We gaze at it for a while, and then suddenly Feiler remembers I'm there. ‘Ah yes, you want to talk. Come!' he says, in an eager and imperious tone.

Back we go across the courtyard, and up some winding stairs to the apartment he shares with his wife, the Swedish artist Gunnila Skold-Feiler, who's as blonde and mild in manner as Feiler is dark and intense. The space is a beguiling mixture of Northern airiness and lightness and Middle-Eastern warmth, with rugs on the floors and walls.

We go up more narrow curving stairs into his study, which is as modest as the gallery we've just left. Outsize scores of Feiler's music teeter precariously from a rough-hewn white-washed space above the door. Books in Hebrew, Swedish, German and English are crammed into the shelves, which cover every inch of wall space. Some of them look like family heirlooms, including the volumes of Marx.

It's really no surprise when Feiler says, ‘My parents were typical Jewish intellectuals of the time. My father was leader of the local Communist party in Tel Aviv, and he was interested in all the modern trends in the art. He was a violinist, my mother was a singer. This impressed on me the idea that being musically avant-garde and politically avant-garde was completely normal, in fact it was more than normal, it was essential. You know that wonderful saying of d'Alembert about freedom?'

I confess I don't.

‘You don't? Oh it's wonderful! He said ‘All Freedoms are bound together. If you want to keep the monarchy, don't change the form of opera!'

Feiler's own parents suffered for their left-wing politics. His father served a prison sentence for fraternising with Palestinians in the mid-80s and his aged mother still works for a charitable organization that dispenses health care to needy Palestinians.Feiler too would become a political activist, but through the medium of music.

‘After my military service - by the way did you know I refused to serve in the Occupied Territories? I was one of the first refuseniks. Anyway, I came to Sweden to see some friends, not knowing quite what to do. I was already interested in new music, and active as an improvising saxophone player. I saw there were some interesting courses at a music college, the Fylkingen Institut, so I thought, why not stay for a while. Then I went on the University, and then to the Conservatoire, where I studied with some wonderful teachers like Brian Ferneyhough. By then I was already playing improvised music, and had set up my own group. So somehow or other I stayed, and now I have been here for 33 years!' he says with a resigned shrug.

But the mild, sweetly reasonable, social-democrat air of Sweden hasn't mellowed Feiler. Nor have his long years in music education turned him into a conventional ‘new music' composer. Though he's now in his late 50s, he still has the air of an outsider, and his encounters with the august institutions of classical music haven't always been happy.

‘Look at this,' he says, pulling down one of those outsize scores. ‘This was the piece commissioned by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra', he says. ‘Halat Hisar' (State of Siege) has more staves than any score I've ever seen, each of them so tiny that I can barely make out the notes. ‘Yes, that was a problem for the conductor' says Feiler, ‘I had to make a new score with bigger staves. But then they refused to play the music because it was too loud.'

A kind of music that has to shout at 105 decibels might be thought to be nothing more than a sophisticated kind of sadism. But Feiler sees loudness as expressively potent.

‘You know one of the first good reviews of my music was from Louis Andriessen,and he loves loudness too! I love to play loudly myself, I don't just ask others to do it. But also it's to do with the way we listen. We musicians always compare things, in a way we are the worst listeners, always saying when we hear something, ‘Ah, yes, that reminds me of...' But if I play really loud it shocks you, you stop thinking and comparing and really listen.'

The political engagement and the aggressive high volume are all ways Feiler tries to break the mould of new music.

‘There is such a stale atmosphere in new music world, that's why I have always found improvisation attractive. Derek Bailey, Anthony Braxton, Evan Parker, these were the people I really admired. Free improvisation creates a special intensity, something hot and molten like lava. I use written notation as a way of achieving a similar intensity by a different route.'

Is that intensity hard to maintain in his own creative life?

‘Of course! There's far too much music in the world, and most of it is created without any real existential need. For a long time I refused to accept commissions, to avoid exactly this problem. But then no-one takes you seriously, they think you have no confidence in yourself. So now I accept commissions, but try to subvert them and turn them to my own purposes.'

Those purposes are always political as much as artistic. I wonder exactly what those politics are, and ask, has he inherited his father's communism? At this point Feiler smiles, spreads his arm wide and shrugs, as if to acknowledge that he's swimming against the tide of history.

‘What can I say? Yes...yes, I am a communist, though I know it's supposed to be an impossible position these days...'

He thinks for a moment, and suddenly becomes heated.

‘Yes, I am a communist because it's to do with having real democracy in the world. What is the point in voting for governments when so much of the real power in the world lies with the multinational companies, who are responsible only to their shareholders? We need a democracy in wealth and ownership.'

Feiler's involvement with politics has frequently got him into hot water. He's visited guerilla camps in Latin America with radical theatre companies, he's chairman of ‘European Jews for a Just Peace', and a recent art installation he created with his wife was the subject of a political storm. ‘Snow White and the Madness of Truth' showed a boat bearing a picture of a female suicide bomber crossing a blood-red sea, while Bach's ‘Mein Herz Schwimmt im Blut' played over loudspeakers. The Israeli ambassador to Sweden was so enraged by what he called this attempt to ‘beautify' suicide bombers that he vandalized it.

‘The Swedish government then asked him to leave,' says Feiler, ‘and soon afterwards I was described by an Israeli commentator as ‘Israel's no 1 enemy in Europe.' I'm now regularly described as a ‘Jewish self-hater'. I'm even compared to Noam Chomsky, which I must say is very flattering.'

Doesn't he ever long for the quiet life of the non-political artist? Feiler snorts with derision at the very idea. ‘I am not interested in just creating art objects, I want to use art as a way of revealing a truth about the world. My art and my politics are really the one thing. I want to be on the side of the all the people in the world who want to change things for the better.'

Visit Dror Feiler's web-site at: http://www.tochnit-aleph.com/drorfeiler/

Ivan Hewett

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